yup, I'm annoyed. It's strange that every mirror less has a rebate going on now. sale must be very low right now. I think this is the first time Sony and Olympus are doing Fuji style rebates. It's alarming that Sony has to rebate so deeply. A7R with both primes go for a little more than the D800E when it first came out. They're already bargain FF.

I even see Canon and Nikon doing rebates several times a year now. The photo gear market is definitely soft,

Eventually, they'll follow Fuji and offer the lens with rebates without buying a camera. I am goint to wait in the future before buying any new lenses. Fuji has kinda conditioned people to hold off buying till they do their quarterly rebates.

Offtopic but that flash is just not worth even $200! I got it with the similarly overpriced a99 and was shocked last evening when it started overheating when I was using it to shoot event portraits at a rate of fire of about one shot every 30 to 45 seconds. The damn thing just puts up an error icon and disables the flash for about 5 minutes forcing me to shoot at very high ISO and too slow shutter speeds as turning the flash off and then back on again didn't get rid of the overheat error. I couldn't believe it. This is Sony's flagship flash and it performs worse than my older lower end 42AM model which had never given me overheating errors. Didn't Sony test this flash before shipping it. Anyway had to rant because I'm getting sick and tired of pointless defects in recent Sony photogear that I recently purchased.

ReneMurea wrote:
Adorama has the same deal plus $450 off the Sony HVL-F60M Wireless Shoe Mount Flash.
The flash comes down to $98 down from $548

Paying a premium price and living on the bleeding edge has always been the cost of admission for early adopters. Such a quick price drop is a bit surprising though. Probably just indicates that Sony had the pricing a bit wrong with respect to the lenses initially.

mco_970 wrote:
I don't think being able to buy a new camera when it comes out qualifies as a bleeding edge of much of anything. Just sayin'...

"Bleeding Edge" usually refers to early adoption of new technology that has not be proven and may have quirks (quirks that early adopters discover). That pretty much describes the first compact, full frame ILC A7's based on the E-Mount to me. Everyone has learned a lot from the experiences of early adopters. That's the context in this instance. If this was the second, third or forth iteration of an existing camera platform, then it would not be "bleeding edge".

mco_970 wrote:
Yeah, I know what bleeding edge is. I just don't think of buying a consumer camera and not getting an expected discount as bleeding edge anything. Don't get your mohawk in a bunch. (just kiddin')

Now that's funny...as if I had enough hair left to have a mohawk!

I'm not sure where you're coming from though. It's not a "bleeding edge product because the current discount was not offered initially?